Word: variousness
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...Last month AIG said it had paid out about $50 billion to various financial firms to which it had sold credit-default swaps, which are insurance contracts sold to bond investors and others. When a bond defaults, a holder of a CDS has the right to be reimbursed for the loss by the seller of the contract. AIG was one of the largest sellers of such contracts. Much of the credit insurance AIG sold was on mortgage bonds, which are backed by home loans. As more and more homeowners defaulted, many of those bonds plummeted in value, causing the holders...
...answer his existential questions. But he hesitates to analyze his own life as an alcoholic, and he uses the stories of his fellow addicts instead: Don Juan the Rib, The Most Wanted Terrorist in the World, the Sugar King, the Queen of Kent, the Hero of Socialist Labor, and various other minor characters. Despite a dense population and a strangely episodic narrative framework, each of Pilch’s characters reads as an emotional mirror; their struggles with alcoholism map a microcosm of the struggles of the human experience. Pilch seems to suggest that rehabilitation is an experience akin...
...in—would be a jazz group,” says The Bad Plus drummer, David King. “But a more accurate description, if you really wanted to get pompous, is that we do music of novelty.” The band, which incorporates various techniques and multiple genres into its musical selection, transcends the classification of being simply a jazz group. Comprised of King, bassist Reid Anderson, and pianist Ethan Iverson, The Bad Plus will be performing at the Berklee Performance Center this evening as a part of a national tour promoting their most recent album...
...Lucca, Venice Be whoever you are. It doesn't matter if you're not naturally funny. Who cares? To be around funny people all the time is kind of exhausting. Sometimes you want to have an actual conversation. Antonio sounds like he would be able to describe to me various types of cured meats and cheeses or the best place to get a fresh piece of pasta. So I say don't worry about...
...Gregorian calendars, when folks who continued to celebrate the old new year (which fell in late March or early April) were called April Fools. But that proved to be a bit of a joke because the calendar change was actually gradual and no one was quite caught off guard. Various other festivals have been cited as inspirations, including the east Asian festival of the burning of the scholars on the new moon of the fourth lunar month (the equivalent of April 1 in the western calendar). The holiday began to evolve (or devolve) 2,200 years ago after Qin Shihuangdi...